The Race for the Atomic Bomb: Scientists, Spies and Saboteurs - The Allies' and Hitler's Battle for the Ultimate Weapon (Ridley Norman)(Pevná vazba)

On 19 December 1938, Otto Hahn, working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, conducted an experiment the results of which baffled him. It took his migr collaborator Lise Meitner to explain that he had split an atom of uranium, which at the time seemed to defy all known laws of physics. When Neils Bohr took this news to the United States it became clear to scientists there that these results opened a completely new and, for some, horrifying possibility of energy production that could be used for both peaceful and military purposes. Scientists in Germany, France, Britain and the US began to delve deeper into the implications. But it was the British government that was the first to explicitly describe how the splitting of the atom might be utilised to create a practical weapon of fearsome power. France, by then, had been occupied by the Germans and most of their nuclear scientists had fled to Britain. For their part, the Germans, who for a time were at the very forefront of nuclear research, had weakened their own scientific ranks by hounding many of their best scientists who had fled persecution under the draconian Nazi racial laws. They still retained, however, possibly the ablest nuclear scientist of them all in Werner Heisenberg who set about developing his own programme for nuclear power. British scientists made extensive progress before realising that translating their laboratory results into the vast industrial enterprise required to build a bo
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